Latest / Booked On Rock with Eric Senich / Jerry Garcia's Traumatic Childhood [Highlight From Episode 316]

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Jerry Garcia's Traumatic Childhood [Highlight From Episode 316] · Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

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  Speaker 1: Here's a highlight from a recent episode of Booked on Rock.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Our guests is Jim Newton. He's the author of the
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  Speaker 1: new book here Beside The Rising Tide, Jerry Garcia, The
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  Speaker 1: Grateful Dead, and an American Awakening. There are a couple painful.
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  Speaker 2: Moments in Jerry's life early on that maybe casual fans
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  Speaker 2: listening may not know the specifics about. So just if
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  Speaker 2: you could talk about one the loss of his finger
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  Speaker 2: and the other the emotional loss with the sudden death
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  Speaker 2: of his father.
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  Speaker 3: Two very traumatic episodes in back to back summers for
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  Speaker 3: very young Jerry Garcia. In the first, he was in
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  Speaker 3: the mountains in Santa Cruz at a cabin that his
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  Speaker 3: family often vacationed in, and he and his brother were
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  Speaker 3: playing around chopping wood. His older brother and Jerry Garcia
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  Speaker 3: was Jerry was putting up little pieces of kindeleen on
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  Speaker 3: a wooden sawhorse, and his brother was chopping them into
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  Speaker 3: smaller pieces, and they were playing around with it, and
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  Speaker 3: his brother accidentally chopped chopped Jerry's finger off. His mother,
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  Speaker 3: who had been a nurse, tried to wrap it and
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  Speaker 3: rush them to hospital. They were a long way away,
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  Speaker 3: and he lost his finger. Of course we all know
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  Speaker 3: him now is iconically missing that middle finger of his
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  Speaker 3: of the one hand. Yeah, not a great start for
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  Speaker 3: a guitar player, obviously, but fortunately for him and for
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  Speaker 3: all the rest of us, it was not of his
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  Speaker 3: fretting hand. It was his right hand, not his left hand,
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  Speaker 3: And so he learned to play the guitar without the finger.
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  Speaker 3: He didn't never have to adjust to not having a finger.
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  Speaker 3: But all of that, of course, is in the future.
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  Speaker 3: In the moment, he's a four year old boy who's
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  Speaker 3: just had his finger chopped off, and so obviously a
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  Speaker 3: very rattling moment for him. And then the far more
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  Speaker 3: traumatic moment the following summer, he and his mother and
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  Speaker 3: father were up on a fishing trip in northern California,
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  Speaker 3: and his father went out to fish, slipped on a
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  Speaker 3: rock and drowned, a little bit of confusion of memory
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  Speaker 3: as to whether Jerry actually witnessed him drowning, but whether
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  Speaker 3: or not that's the case from that point forward. Obviously,
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  Speaker 3: he didn't have a father. His mother was overwhelmed by
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  Speaker 3: the challenger trying to raise him and his brother, so
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  Speaker 3: she turned him the brothers over to their grandparents. So
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  Speaker 3: he was separated from both his mother and his father
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  Speaker 3: for a period, he developed asthma. It was a very
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  Speaker 3: difficult young life for Jerry